Thursday, August 21, 2008

SOA-R Educational Series Schedule Changes

Since launching the SOA-R series back in July, cloud computing has become a hot topic among national security professionals. Evidence of this high level of interest is obvious from the following recent events:

The New York Times reported John Garing (CIO DoD) as saying that he is "...convinced that cloud-based IT services will be the future of military data processing." Cloud computing is "going to be the way it has to be," ... "We have to get to this standard environment that is provisionable and scalable." [1]

LTG Jeffrey A. Sorenson, Chief Information Officer/G-6, Office of the Secretary of the Army cites Google as a good model and cloud computing as a good direction for the Army. “You can just have your browser on a thin client, tap into that cloud, get your files, get your e-mail, get your content, whatever you need in order to work. So we are clearly looking at leveraging the same type of concept and capabilities that they’re trying to put in the commercial world into what we have in the military in the future.” [2]

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium will be holding a functional team and working group session entitled "Cloud Computing for Netcentric Operations" during their plenary session, 15-19 September where "Industry leaders [will] discuss the possible roles for Cloud Computing in future government computing architectures"[3]

For the SOA-R team, this heightened level of interest has translated into a much more hectic schedule. As a result, the September 11th session has been canceled, limiting the SOA-R schedule to the final two events:

“Increased Efficiency and Reduced Cost” to be held October 8th with speakers from 3Tera, Apptis, Gigaspaces and Amazon scheduled; and

“Mission Relevance” to be held November 12th.

The final two session will still be held at The Tower Club – Tysons Corner in Vienna, Virginia. The events begin at 9am and end at 2pm. The SOA-R series is co-sponsored by IBM, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, Google, Cisco, and Great Circle Technologies.